NPR |Thursday, February 5, 2026 
For the first time in decades, the U.S. and Russia have no limits on nuclear weapons

The world’s two largest nuclear powers, Russia and the United States, no longer have any limits on their arsenals. At midnight on Thursday, a 15-year-old treaty called New START expired, and with it, caps on the number of weapons the two sides could deploy on missiles, bombers and submarines. “There are no more guardrails on the sizes of the United States and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals,” said Christine Wormuth, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an arms control advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “That has not been the case for decades.” President Trump posted on social media on Thursday, “Rather than extend ‘NEW START’ (A badly negotiated deal by the United States that, aside from everything else, is being grossly violated), we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” The White House had told NPR earlier that Trump would like to “involve China in arms control talks.” Addressing the impending demise of the treaty earlier this week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that it would be a “more dangerous” world without limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. – What the New START treaty did – New START was negotiated with Russia under President Barack Obama. At the time, the treaty was just the latest in a 50-year effort to bring down the number of nuclear weapons each side pointed at the other. (“New START” stands for New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It replaced a previous START I treaty signed by President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.)…READ MORE